Grandmothers With Wolf Howls in Our Hearts

La Donna Allard

photo by Kat Eng

Listen to the song of the ancients,

Grandmothers and Grandfathers

from the Old Ways.

For we are the seventh generation,

the white buffalo calf has been born,

and the time of prophecy is at hand.

On the wind, I can hear 

Grandmother weeping.

She is calling to us

to stand for the water, the air,

the forest, the earth

and all its creatures.

What world will we leave

to the children seven generations

from now?

The Black Snake slithers across the land.

Oil spills into rivers.

Mother Earth's womb is torn asunder

by fracking.

Whales choke on plastic

in a dying ocean

and the two poles are melting,

week by week.

A madman sits in the throne of power

with money as his only god.

All protection is being stripped away

and men with dead eyes stalk the halls 

of government,

claiming truth is false news

and outrageous lies are truth.

In our hearts, Wild Woman stirs in protest.

This is our earth, the home that we love.

You cannot threaten our children's future

without incurring our wrath.

The Grandmothers' blood runs through our veins.

Our backbones grew strong in birthing.

Our hearts know truth. 

We will never believe your lies.

When it comes to our children,

we have no choice but to fight.

We are gathering in front of the White House walls

in peace, but with hearts like banshees.

We are standing by the sides of rivers 

and sacred burial grounds.

We cannot turn away, 

for our beloveds are buried here

and our children  - and yours! - 

need this water to drink.

You have dotted the landscape of our nightmares

with strip mines and oil derricks.

Everywhere are nuclear power plants

that threaten our combined existence.

And now you rattle the sabers of war

and cast eyes on our fresh-cheeked children?

No! It is Enough.

We have lived mens' ways for millennia

and look what a mess we're in.

The Grandmothers and the Mothers

and the dancing Maidens

and the strong little rainbow children 

are rising

with fire in our eyes

and transformation in our hearts -

with compassion even for you men 

in the halls of power, 

wounded and empty,

whose dead eyes proclaim

you have never felt truly loved.

Here is a secret:

even a billion trillion dollars

will not ease that wound.

Instead, hug your sad-eyed sons

and smile - not like  crocodiles - 

at your unhappy wives.

Trade in your gold walls

for a chance to be real,

and let the rest of us live

in peace.

This war is a holy war

of light over darkness

and truth over lies.

You have might,

but we have Right 

on our side,

and wolf howls in our hearts

who will never be silent

until social justice is

the rule of the land.

Well. One can dream. This one wrote itself out of the angst of these past weeks, every day another more impossibly outrageous happening than the last. It is the Time of the Grandmothers. Time for women to stand up and move into positions where we can effect change - not just any change, but change that makes sense for the earth and its people - and for its wild places and their creatures. Time for women's wisdom to gentle the old warring way of governing the world, which clearly only begets more war and devastation.

I think of La Donna Allard who made a statement recently about being the first to stand by the river at Standing Rock and vow to oppose the creeping pipeline, "because I had no choice. My son is buried there. And millions need the water to drink." It is her land where the protectors made their stand. She had no idea how big Standing Rock would become, how the brave people who stood praying by that river through the bitter winter would move the world. And now the military forces are moving in to disband the camp. The pipeline is to go ahead, even with recent oil spills not a hundred miles away.

And now they will be imprisoned as "economic terrorists" because only money matters in this screwed up world, and the real terrorists, who are laying waste the land and waters of Mother Earth to fill their own pockets, are supported by government to do their plundering. If the planet survives, history will look back at us, aghast. We have all the information. But the system cannot wrest itself from outdated dependence on fossil fuels, though there is money to be made and jobs to be had switching to clean energy - enough to solve economic, employment and environmental problems. Sigh. We may as well be speaking to the wind right now, since the magician went poof! and made climate change disappear.

With the ugly rhetoric assaulting our ears these past weeks, I am heartened by how many are rising in response all over the world to say "this is not the world we want to live in." Showing that there are many more good hearts than warped ones on this planet. And maybe things had to get this bad to show us all that is crying out to be fixed. Women are good at mending. Let us pick up our darning needles and begin.